Page 50 - bne_Magazine_May_2017_print

50 I Central Europe bne May 2017
Thousands demonstrate in central Budapest against new higher education legislation seen as targeting the Central European University - aerial photo. Photo: Drone Media Studio / Shutterstock.com
Hungarian government had been
planning attack on Central European
University for months
Dan Nolan in Budapest
Budapest’s Central European University (CEU) is facing an existential threat from pro- posed Hungarian government amend- ments that the graduate university argues specifically target it and which have been in the works for months.
The university was founded by George Soros, the US-Hungarian philanthro- pist in 1991. Through CEU and other schemes, Soros has bankrolled the post- graduate studies of several Hungarian government officials, including Prime Minister Viktor Orban himself, and
the two men maintained reasonably good, if uneasy, relations until around the time of Orban’s election victory in 2014. Since then, however, the Orban govern- ment’s PR machine has been turned against the “Open Society” values of Soros and CEU, which do not chime
with his stated aim to to abandon liberal democracy in favour of an “illiberal state”.
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So the mood was one of dismay, rather than surprise, when hundreds of students, professors and at least seven locally based diplomats arrived at
the CEU building for a crisis meeting
on the afternoon of March 29. CEU president and rector Michael Ignatieff had announced the meeting in a letter widely distributed on social media the previous evening, and the main CEU auditorium was so full of CEU supporters by 12:30pm that the university
had to set up live streams in other classrooms to accommodate them all.
Ignatieff, a former Liberal party leader in Canada, said the legislative amendments proposed on March 28 were plainly and specifically targeted to force the closure of his institution. “CEU will not be
closed under any circumstances and its academic programmes will continue,” he stated. “We can’t even begin to talk to the government unless the bill is withdrawn.”
“Freedom is not an abstraction here, folks, it is what we run on, without it we can't do anything of any value,” he added.
Zsolt Enyedi, CEU’s pro-rector for Hungarian Affairs, highlighted
five amendments that would endanger the university’s operations. The clearest discrimination, Enyedi claimed, is the provision preventing universities in Hungary from issuing degrees from non- European institutions. As CEU has dual accreditation in the US and in Hungary, under the amendments it would in effect be unable to recruit new students from February 2018 onwards. He noted that any solution to the accreditation issue would involve a bilateral agreement between Hungary and New York State, rather than Washington. Amongst
other problematic stipulations is the proposed elimination of a waiver that allows non-EU academics to work
at CEU without a work permit.